Cape Fear Academy kids can add Mandarin to available classes

Friday

Aug 23, 2013 at 11:20 AM

To the untrained eye, it looked like the sixth-graders were just sketching lines on their papers.

By Pressley BairdPressley.Baird@StarNewsOnline.com

To the untrained eye, it looked like the sixth-graders were just sketching lines on their papers.Andrew Gramley made several short marks, moving his pencil up and down and side to side, going in the same order every time. It felt more like drawing than writing, he said. But when he was finished, he didn't have a picture in front of him. He had a Chinese phrase: "Ni hao."Andrew and his classmates are the first crop of students who will be learning Mandarin Chinese at Cape Fear Academy. It's the inaugural year of the school's program, which is one of the only in-person Chinese language classes in the area. And even though students have only been in the class for about a week, they've already mastered how to write and say the language's main greeting: "Ni hao" means "hello."Cape Fear Academy began the Mandarin Chinese program this year with 20 sixth-grade students, said Susan Harrell, director of advancement for the school. These students will keep taking Mandarin Chinese as they move through middle school and on into high school, and the school will continue to offer a beginning Mandarin Chinese class for each new group of sixth-grade students. China's growing population and its economic influence prompted Cape Fear Academy to start the program, said Donald Berger, the school's headmaster. The school chose Mandarin because it's the most recognized dialect of the Chinese language. It's considered the official language in China, and it's widely spoken in other Asian countries, including Singapore and Malaysia. Plus, said Mandarin Chinese teacher Lu Xue, in China, "we all teach that in school."Xue (pronounced like "shoe") spent most of her life in China, moving to the United States a few years ago to get her master's degree in education at Vanderbilt University. She sees her teaching as a "bridge between Chinese students and American students," she said – a way for students to learn a new language and a new culture. It still feels very new to students such as sixth-grader Stella Bloom. She's still learning about the pinyin, which is how English people pronounce Chinese words – or as Stella put it, "just learning how to sound stuff out."Andrew had listened to some Mandarin Chinese CDs before he started taking the class. To him, learning the language was "pretty easy," although he was daunted by the number of words and characters he had to remember. Stella was confident that she and Andrew would be well on their way to fluency soon."It's fun," she said. "I'm excited for the rest of the year."